


Bly Talks About Her Past

by knitmeapony



Series: Eternal Harvest [2]
Category: Changeling: the Dreaming
Genre: F/F, F/M, Gen, Suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-05
Updated: 2015-05-05
Packaged: 2018-03-29 04:43:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 7
Words: 7,549
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3882745
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/knitmeapony/pseuds/knitmeapony
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The history of my LARP OC, Blythe Elizabeth Nelson, Boggan Grump.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Let Me Tell You About My Mother

**Author's Note:**

> Created for Eternal Harvest, and a companion piece to Caera Talks About Her Past
> 
> In this game, Bly was created first. At a certain point, we all realized we were trapped in a Matrix-like scenario, and not who we believed we were. Bly was the dream of Caera, her ideal, the woman she wished she could be.
> 
> Each story is a companion to one for the other character -- two stories about mothers, about fathers, about David and Tiffany and Vic, and about the Baron(ess) who is truly cruel, and of course about William. There is a link to the companion piece at the end of each chapter.

So, Mom was a good lady. There wasn't much special about her, to be honest -- she cleaned other people's houses and she tried to keep our heads above water. She and Dad never married (I'll tell you about Dad some other time) and I know she wasn't ever really all that interested in romance. She and I are a lot alike, in that way.

Her name was Margaret -- Peggy to most folks -- and we had a one-bedroom apartment in the same building where she grew up on the South Side of Chicago. It was a Polish neighborhood, and even though we were more Western European mutts than Polish we were an old enough family that we had plenty of friends around.

Anyway, like I said, a good lady. Smart, too. She picked up plenty of Polish -- she worked hard at it -- and it meant she got more work, she met more people. The neighborhood looked after itself, and she made sure we were thoroughly part of the neighborhood. It meant getting invited to dinner during weeks when food was lean, and a place for me to go when she had to work late on a school night. It meant our apartment was almost never just the two of us -- a 'cousin' sleeping over when his dad was drinking again, or someone borrowing the oven when theirs was broken. 

It meant other peoples husbands over to fix the plumbing when the super wouldn't come by, and someone 'accidentally' drying and folding our laundry when it was downstairs. It was a hell of a community.

So when I disappeared on her after my chrysalis, when I was 11, she turned all those resources to bear on the problem. She knew me so well -- we'd always been good friends -- and she figured where it was I'd been hanging out, where I'd gone when I was upset. She learned who my new friends were, what their names were, when they'd come into the neighborhood. She found out where I was living. She tracked me down. You want trouble? Try fighting a war while your mom is on your case. Oh, she was dogged as hell. She'd never stop finding me, always at the worst time. She never stopped trying to get me to come home.

And that's all she wanted, really. She was a good, good lady. She loved me, and she wasn't mad, and she didn't even want an explanation. She just wanted me to come home. And I, I never could. (But like I said, I'll tell you about Dad some other time.)

I don't really know when Mom died. I know when I came back after my time in the Dreaming, I never looked her up. I couldn't risk it. I know that by the time I got up the courage to try to look in on her, she was already in the ground.

So that's Mom, I guess. She tried her hardest, and I never appreciated it. Never had the chance to.

I wonder if she realized she had a grandkid? I wouldn't put it past her, really, to just not mention it because I never did. She probably did. Hell, she probably checked in on him now and then. I think she'd be proud of who he is. I am.

But anyway, Mom. Here's to you. You taught me how to clean a bathroom, fold a fitted sheet, and never give up on anyone.


	2. Let Me Tell You About Vic

Vic was amazing and terrible for me, and that’s all you can really expect out of a satyr. Vic was all kinds of fearless and cool wrapped up in something strange and needy. Vic was seventeen, and I was fourteen. At least, he told me he was seventeen. Reports vary, I guess.

It was three years after my chrysalis, and I’d left home because of my father (and I’ll tell you about Dad some day, I promise.) I joined a little group of fosterlings being taken care of by a troll, one of the finest women I’ve ever known (GraceAnn was her name, but if you’ve heard about her they called her Patience. Ap Scathatch, if you must know.)

This little group of fosterlings, we were close but not family. Just a bunch of wild kids rambling around in the middle of a war, and we all had different thoughts on how the war should go. Me, I took to it right away; I had memories of being left behind, of who they were and what they’d done to us. I was ready to do everything I could to keep them from having what they wanted. It meant I was a little fearless too.

The other kids were afraid of it. They missed their parents, they missed their school and their lives. They didn’t understand that these sidhe weren’t a new family, they were traitors and enemies. Some of them didn’t really understand why we were fighting. But I did.

Back then I was young and a hell of a lot more spry than I am now, but I’ve never been one for fighting or violence. Still, I could really move and I took to Metamorphosis like a duck to water. So I was the one who went in to spy, in the end, to pass messages and get a good look at those damned returning Sidhe, see what they could possibly be up to.

And Vic, he was… well, in modern terms, we’d probably call him either a handler or an inside man. He was all the way in, working for one of the returned sidhe and ready and willing to pass word on in to me, anytime I asked.

His kind of spying was tough. You had to nod and smile and swallow shit every day. But still, he could talk to people. He had contact with dozens, he was friends with most of them. Me, I had nothing. I think that’s why I learned to willow whisper, truth be told – I was bored, and I was lonely, and sometimes I made friends with the walls.

And then there was Vic. On those long trips into an enemy stronghold, there he was to keep me company, to tell me what was going on, to advise me on where to hide or when to leave. At first we were all business, then we started talking. He was, like me, a true believer. He didn’t have the memories I did, but he’d felt the awe and power of the sidhe and he didn’t want that lorded over him. 

He was nice enough to me, and I rather liked him – and it didn’t hurt that he had the kind of lanky ease and rumpled, youthful handsomeness that his kith was quite prone to.

We had a fine relationship, in the end. And then one night, he crept into the store room where I’d been hiding and napping.

He whispered that there was no one left in the house, that they’d all gone off to meet with the duke, that it was just the two of us. And then he asked to see me.

I’d always been hiding when we talked, just in case. It hadn’t occurred to me that he’d never seen my face, but I trusted him. And I let slip the glamour and stepped out of the shadows.

“Damn,” he said with a little smile. "You’re kind of pretty.“

I laughed at him and we hugged for a long minute, and then, just like that, he kissed me.

It was one night, and only one night. It was sweet and warm and necessary, and it made me feel alive and beautiful. We talked for hours, until we heard the household returning, and then I hid us both until he could pretend to return from his own errands and I could slip away. 

Two months later, he was gone, and no one knew if he was dead or missing.

Two months after that, I realized I was pregnant.

I kept it hidden for ages – I was already a little round, and I was always in the shadows anyway – but eventually I had to come clean to Patience. And she was good and kind as she’d always been, and the war was starting to come to an end as it was. So I didn’t have to go away, I had the baby at home and named him after some heroes of mine, and the fosterlings and I did our best to raise him until I did my own disappearing.

And I never saw Vic again, not hide nor hair, not even reborn, except every now and then when my son smiles.


	3. Let Me Tell You About Tiffany

_So I walked back to my room and collapsed on the bottom bunk, thinking that if people were rain, I was drizzle and she was a hurricane. - John Green_

There are no photographs of Tiffany.  Tiffany lived before cameras, before photographs.  Her name was Theophania, but we all called her Tiffany.  It was the 15th century, and ain't that strange?  You'd think she was my son's age, but no.

She was an Eshu, and oh god, she was beautiful.  More glorious and terrible than any sidhe, stronger than a troll, kinder than a boggan.  She was like a perfect night incarnate, dreams without any fears, when the stars are so clear they make you look past them and into some someday-perfect-future.  She had black eyes and rich skin and soft hair, and she only wore colors that were rich, indigo and carmine and vivid gold.

She was more fae than changeling, I swear.

I think I loved her.

She would come and she would go; she walked everywhere she went and we would see her from a long way off, coming up the tattered roads with an easy, mile-eating gait.  When I was a girl I'd run out to meet her by the stile, but as I got older and my patience got longer I'd let her really arrive before I went to see her.

She always came back just as things were about to happen, and so there was always a feast in her honor; it didn't matter if it was to celebrate what was to come or brace us against the next horror, it was always worthy of the time and the passion.

She slept in my bed, and she told me stories she told no one else, about lovers and friends from far-off lands, about what she'd seen in the deep dreaming.  When she got older, she'd tell me about the aches in her bones, about the scars on her back and the breaks in her fingers.  From her I learned about misery.

But it was the telling that was the important thing, and pain shared was always pain divided.  And while she fascinated me in my youth, as we grew older together I think I held more mystery for her than the other way around.

I made it to grump then, too, old but not weary.  And one of the years when the winter didn't bear down on us so hard, when we had plenty of dross and the long darkness was good for resting and sitting by the fire, I made a gown that was the stuff of legend, and I gave it to Tiffany as a gift.  She gave me stories in return, sagas and glorious odes, and I wove them into ribbons and put them in my hair.

And she still made me breathless, but in the later days she clung to me like a broken ship to shore.   I think I was a rock for her, and I never understood why you'd need such a thing.

I think I get it now, of course.  Birds need nests, and foxes need dens.  Winds need valleys, and waves need the sea. Even dragons need hoards.  The wildest thing needs a place to call home.

Learning that changed me, a bit.

See, storms are glorious and terrible and necessary, but they can't exist without the between times.  People say any port in a storm and they think of the storm as the stronger thing, but it's the port that stays, long after the storm is gone.  It's the port that will be, no matter how it's torn apart.  When we're ripped from our homes, when sticks and stones and straw are blown away, we don't lose the land.  We don't lose where we belong.

Even when I ran away from home (and I promise, I will tell you about Dad some day) it was still  _home_ , and when I came back from the Dreaming I wasn't right until I'd found a  _home_  again.  I should've known that.  I should've remembered what Tiffany taught me.

I always fretted about who I was.  When I walked home thinking that if people were rain, I was drizzle and she was a hurricane, well, I thought it was the hurricane that was safe, that it was strong and powerful and no one could touch it.

But it's the drizzle that makes the flowers grow, it's the drizzle that makes the rivers run.  It's the drizzle you sit with, next to the fire, glad for the chance at another cup of tea.  It's the drizzle that makes your bones ache, and it's the drizzle, in the end, that doesn't need the hurricane.  The hurricane needs the port to be the storm.  It needs the drizzle to be the drama.  

But the drizzle  _is_  the port.  It's home.  And if you  _are_  that thing, if you're the signpost and the signifier, you never get lost.

So that's who I want to be.


	4. Let Me Tell You About David

Drinking whiskey out of a coffee cup for this one.  Hope you're ready.

David's my son, and I couldn't be more proud of him.  He's a cop, and that's one of the reasons, honest to god, that I have the bar that I do.

See, I got pregnant at fourteen by a man who disappeared before either of us knew.  I don't regret Vic, and I don't think he'd have stayed even if he could've.  I don't know that I'd have wanted to.

It was the end of the Accordance Wars, the last couple of messy years, and there I was, fifteen with a baby.  And I had plenty of memories, I was pretty decent at taking care of a little one little bits at a time.  It was the endlessness of it all that got to me.

I loved him.  I did.  But I spent more time in tears than anything else.  I didn't sleep enough as it was.  I didn't eat much anyway. He was beautiful, and he was mine, but he was this weight.  This awful, endless weight.

(And oak and ash, David, if you ever read this, I think you know what that time was like.  And I know you've said 'thank god you disappeared' to me, so I think you know it ended well, and I have always loved you.  But that time of my life was harder than anything else I've ever done.)

So when the endgame began and the lord of the manor returned, when it came time for everyone to flee and someone to stay behind, I volunteered.  And then I left David with Patience. 

And that's when I disappeared for ten years.  Disappeared from this realm, that is; I was cast out into the Dreaming and off the Silver Path.  I was lost, deep in chimerical wastelands and worse, and it took me a decade to get home.

He was three when I left and thirteen when I returned, and he remembered me, fuzzy bits and pieces.  And in the intervening space he'd been adopted by a nice family in a decent neighborhood.  And they were good people, and when we -- we I say, because Patience was still around -- when we told them that I'd been in a hospital all that time, they understood.  And they let me take time with him, and we got to know each other.

I can still remember that first conversation with him.  Want to hear it?  It's dry as toast, but it went like this.

"Hey."

"Hey."

"What do they call you?"

"David."  He had his hands in his pockets and he was slouched so low under his hat I thought he was shorter than me.  "I don't like my other name anymore."

"That's okay.  I'd change my name too."  I couldn't help but just look at him, then.  It was... amazing.  Remarkable.  I could see how he'd grown into this skin; I knew every freckle on his neck, I knew a mark on the back of his hand.  I knew every inch of him, somehow, even ten years later.

But he didn't know me.  "Where did you go?"

"Crazy.  Sorry." (You have to imagine all the awkward pauses, the waiting for someone to say something else.)  "I mean, it wasn't really my fault, but.  Still.  Sorry."

"It's okay.  Did something happen to you?"

"Yeah.  Something bad."

"I can tell.  You look bad.  I mean.  Scars.   Sorry."

"It's okay."

"So what're you going to do now?"

"I don't know.  I guess I have some money.  I'll figure something out."

"In Chicago?"

"Where else would I go?"

"I don't know.  Crazy, maybe."  He smiled a little at me, and it made me smile back, and god, my heart hurt.  Because he looked like Vic, and he sounded like me, and god, my son.  My  _son_.  The conversation was dull, it was practically banal.  But he remembered me.  And I knew, the moment I saw him, that it was him.

He was so clever and so mature -- something I never was, not at that age -- and he never threw a fit, not once.  He didn't ask me why, he never asked me where the scars came from.  (He did ask me who, once, when he was on some nasty case or another -- I think it reminded him of me -- but I never told him.)

Things weren't okay.  Things weren't remotely okay, but we got there, piece by piece.  He was in high school by then, and a year or two later he decided he wanted to be a cop like his father -- adoptive father -- and not long after that Fredrick's Beard went up for sale.  Of course the bar wasn't called the Beard back then, but I bought it and named it and I always had room for police.  I made a point of it.

David'd come by after school, he'd have dinner and we'd talk and he'd listen to the cops talk shop, and they're the ones who talked him into college before he hit the force.  I'll always thank them for that.

When he was twenty-six he started calling me mom.  His parents are still alive, they're still fine, but they've moved down to Nashville to be near the heat and away from the snow, and his sister lives out in the suburbs.  (Don't worry, she's not mine.)  So we have a family now, him and me, and we have a few traditions, and he still doesn't know what I am.

It's hard, keeping things from the mortals, isn't it?  Even when you know the mists will cover their eyes. After a while you just want to confess.  You want to enchant them, to bring them home.

And when he was a kid he asked things that made me wonder if maybe he was kinain at least.

But he's over forty now, and he's never had a chrysalis, and he's never seemed enchanted.  He's never reacted to magic or to chimera, not that I've seen. 

So I have this boy, this beautiful, ordinary boy.  There's nothing banal about him.  He may be a cop, but he's a good one, a kind one.  And he's got this artistic streak, he takes photographs at every party we have. He's a good man, though that's nothing to do with me.  He's a miracle.

He's loved and he's lost, and he's got this boyfriend now that makes me grind my teeth, I swear to god.  He's just a little too upper crust for my tastes, dropping casual references to people I don't know with names that I do.  But I can't complain too much -- he treats David well, and their condo is lovely, and it's warm in the winter and tidy when I come over, and there's always good food in the kitchen. I almost forgive him for calling me "Nell".  We commiserate  sometimes, on the fact that my son has the heart of a troll.  Not quite in those words, of course, but close enough.

David tries to protect me, which I find charming.  He doesn't really know what's out there, and I'm forever and always afraid for him -- both from the ordinary criminals and the prodigals both.  I'm afraid some day I'm going to have to save him, and then confess all this nonsense to him, and then watch the memory fade from his eyes.  I'm afraid some day he's going to get himself killed.

I don't know that I have the heart to lose any part of him.


	5. Let me tell you about Letholdus Denvorn ap Eiluned, pernicious bastard, mendacious twatwaffle, useless bastard

I've been saving this one, because it's a mess up in side my head.  They only get uglier from here on out, I'm sorry to say.  Anybody who wants a happy ending, well, get out now.  Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.  This is one of those places where I'm going to have no sympathy, no empathy, that I'm not going to paint with a fair brush.  

Letholdus Denvorn ap Eiluned.  Doesn't that just SOUND like a fucking evil sorceror?  I'd have only maybe been less suspicious of the bastard if his name was Kittenfluffles Cuddlekins the Revered.  Anyone with a name like that probably gave it to himself ironically, I swear to fucking god. 

Anyway, so the Resurgence was happening.  It'd been happening for ages by the time I had my chrysalis.  Most people sort of picture it like one big rainbow bridge with a cast of thousands, but in fact they came trickling back the way they left: one at a time, and with their retinues.  Denvorn was one of the first wave through.

I wasn't there, in 1969.  But believe you me, I heard stories.

He didn't ask to return.  He didn't say thank you.  He didn't stop by to see who was still in his barony.  He just walked in and threw them all out. The holdings of the Glass Earth returned to the Barony of Drowned Mountain overnight, and if you weren't sworn you weren't welcome.

He wasn't so crass as to violate the Escheat, of course.  Perish the thought that he'd do something outright illegal.  They were welcome to visit the balefire, of course.  But more or less they came home to find their furniture on the lawn.

Decades, centuries of watching over the trod patiently and diligently.  All that work to keep the balefire lit, the house beautiful, and they were out on their ear.

But it was more than that.

The ones who protested, they found themselves having a hard time in their mortal lives.  That little fucker did not take long to figure out the world and how to punish people who didn't toe the line.  Anyone who refused to bow found themselves fired, evicted, stolen from.

And all of that was before we declared war.

Once we were at war, he didn't pull punches.  He tapped the very fucking  _D_ _á_ _n_  to punish us for our insolence.  Our luck got bad, our fate got worse.  We didn't have all that much to fight against him with, to be honest.  Pitchforks and earnest good will.  We sabotaged his fighters, his supply lines, but for a long time we tried not to hurt anyone.  Not the commoners, anyway.

We used to run this game, you know.   We'd creep onto the freehold, we'd find a way to sneak up on him, and we'd tag him with something before running away.  Sometimes paint, sometimes chalk dust, always harmless.

We played it every week, especially with the new kids, until someone came back with a broken hand and burn scars on his arms.  And crying. Never saw a troll cry until that day.  The break was bad, messed him up good for a while. We were more careful after that.

I met him for the very first time when my magic failed me. Maybe he did it, maybe Denvorn was the one who cut me off. Maybe the Dreaming wanted me to meet.  Maybe I was tired.  Maybe I fucked up. Maybe it's just one of those fucking things.

I was watching him get into his car.  I was up on his roof, where I'd been for a couple days by then, sliding in and out to steal food or use the bathroom.  He looked up, and fuck, he saw me.

I knew who he was.  I knew what he did.  But until that moment, he didn't know me.  I felt the cold bolt of his anger slide into me like a fucking knife.  He paced across the yard and looked up at me, hissing like a sluagh.

"Who are you, child?  Who do you belong to?"  His smile was like oil on ice.  "Don't worry, I won't hurt you."  I was only a teenager, but I knew not to trust a face like that.

And I told him, with all due malice and anger in return, "I am Bly Nelson ap  _Commoner_ , you mendacious prick."  His smile slid off and I could see him muttering under his breath.  "You have hurt my friends, you have hurt my family, and when when the axe falls on your neck I will be the one wielding it if I can do a fucking thing about it."

He finished his mumbling -- his bunk, no doubt --  and I found myself bounced off the roof and back down to the ground.  I heard my leg snap when I hit.

He picked me up and I could almost hear him flying into a rage.  (I remembered that kind of rage.  And it scared me.  But I'll tell you about my Dad some other time, I promise.)

I don't remember much after that.  He put me in a box and left me on the porch when he was done.  Called them, told them they could pick me up.

I do remember the two weeks I was in casts and canes and bandages. (Thank fuck for heather balm.)  I can still feel the aches when it rains. 

My mom caught up with me when I was in the hospital.

(She tried to get me to come home.

But that's a different story.)

He fought us til the bitter end, until he finally drove us out of every safe place we had.  He gathered every scrap of glamour, every holding, all down to one little trod in the corner of the barony.  And we clung to it with our teeth, we did, until he pinned us down and routed us.

We knew that we had to get out, get away from him and his, but someone had to open the trod.  Someone had to stay behind and close it, and let everyone get away safe.

And I'd gone through enough shit by then that I thought maybe this time I could hide from him, and I volunteered and let everyone else go in ahead of me.  (And I will tell you about the shitstorm of memory that drew up, some other time. All my stories run together somehow.  I guess that's called getting old.)

They walked through the trod and it closed behind them, and then there he was like he'd been waiting for it. 

He wanted to know where they'd gone.  He wanted every one of their names. 

I said no.

He asked if I remembered the last time we met.

I said I'd rather cut out my own tongue than say a single word to him.

And he laughed and offered me a knife. 

I don't think he expected me to do it.

He had someone open the trod, had them throw me out through it.  They made sure I was off the Silver Path when the door closed.  I think the intention was to let me die, tongue in my pocket, tears in my eyes.  But I lived.  Ten years it took me, but I fucking lived.

I hear somebody put a knife in his heart eventually.  Someone inside the house, someone who he hurt worse than me.  It doesn't make it better.  He was dead by the time I got home, so I never got to see it myself.  I don't forgive, and I don't forget, and I still have dreams sometimes.

I guess the real bitch of it is, I know he couldn't have been some crazy, useless villain.  He wasn't actually Kittenfluffles Cuddlekins the Revered, you know?  He was a person.  He existed.

And I watched him a thousand times in his house.  I was spying on him for weeks and months, and I saw things about him.  He laughed.  He loved the people in his retinue.  He worked hard to make sure the place stayed neat.  He was a man of the Dreaming, and a man of dreams.  

He wasn't happy, but he had happy times.  When he was Seelie, maybe. 

But when he was Unseelie -- maybe in the end, when he was worse -- he was terrible. Great and ugly and miserable and terrible. Sometimes he fought against it.  Usually he gave up.  You could see it, when the sanity leaked out of his eyes, when he just let the Dreaming take over.

Maybe he was meant to be this person.  Maybe as Eiluned he knew that it was the way Drowned Mountain was meant to be.  It was an ugly, raw sore, and it got uglier and more raw the longer the war went on.  But sometimes, I think about debriding wounds.

Maybe everything had to be torn open so it'd heal right.

Sometimes I wonder if I don't understand enough about fate to understand it had to be.

But like I said, I don't forgive, and I don't forget, and I still have dreams sometimes.  If he still exists, my dreams tie him forever to the smell of burned skin, of the sound of broken bones and the taste of copper.

And I hope there's hell, and I hope he burns.


	6. Let Me Tell You About William

I'm fucking drunk now, so you're going to have to deal with me being maudlin.  You get to hear about William ap Fiona, Knight to Duke James Firsthill ap Gwydion.

You know what I think the most amazing thing about us is?  Fae, I mean. It's that we're always being born.

I don't mean the ones who are reborn.  That's great and that keeps us alive, because we're born damn slow.

But every now and then, just often enough to give me hope, someone is new.  Every once in a while, you meet someone and it's their first time around.

This is the story of my first time around.  

Once upon a time, there was a girl who lived in a castle.  And she was happy.  

It was easy to be happy, in those days.  She had her tasks, and she did them well.  Her name was Blythe, but everyone called her Bly.  Her mother was a shoemaker, which meant something in those days, and her father was something else all together.

And she was  _young_ , god, she was ten when she started working in the castle.  Still a girl, with hair in two braids and skirts up to her knee in summer.

She cooked and she cleaned and she carried the wine, and she met everyone who lived there, including a young squire by the name of William.

William was sweet-tempered and kind.  And though he was a noble and she was not, they became the dearest of friends.  He would take her out on little adventures, and guard her while she picked mushrooms and berries in the forest.  And she would hide the best pies and the finest cut of meat on his plate when she was serving.

No one thought better of it, because they were children.  And they lived so easily.

And then they grew older, and that friendship turned to something else, something sweeter and richer and deeper.  And sometimes they went  to the forest for mushrooms and berries, and sometimes when they went they lost track of time, sleeping in sun-dappled copses and chasing each other through deer paths.

And no one thought better of it, because they were so young.

And then they fell in love.

It was the kind of love that came like breathing. It was the kind of love that meant we couldn't -- you couldn't -- spend a day without seeing each other.  Every touch, every kiss was necessary.  Every conversation was endless and ended too soon. It was like a compass, feeling the magnetic pull, the gravity of the other.

They were electric, before electricity.  They were lightning.  You could feel the buzz and hum at a distance.

And she was new, god, she was so new. It was her first time around, and to her everything was like this.  There was no universe without the buzz and hum.  There was no world without sleeping in the forest and making love in the hayloft. There were no days without kisses.

The world, though, it wasn't so innocent.

The dreaming was suffering.  And these children in love, they were fae.  They heard stories about people leaving, about other royals walking away from the broken world.

But she thought that her masters were good, and kind, and would never do such things to anyone.

And perhaps William was.

But by then he was a knight, and that meant he had to follow orders.  On one day, he made love to her and promised her the universe and the stars and the sun.  On the next day, he was cold.

And she didn't know why, because they'd kept her from the worst of the rumors.  She didn't know why, because she didn't know that they were leaving.  The dreaming was suffering, so badly that the Sidhe were running scared.  They were packing back to Arcadia.  They were leaving the real world forever.

In a just world, they would have taken everyone with them.  They would have made sure the trods had enough strength to get everyone through.  But it wasn't a just world, even once upon a time, even that long ago, even in the world where everything was buzzing and kisses and sunlight.

Because it wasn't a just world, she watched, hand clenched tight to her mother's, as her love stared straight ahead, holding back any who tried to interfere with their Duke's family leaving back into the Dreaming.

His family, and then his pets.  His horses, and all their tack. All the furniture in the house, all the treasure, real and Chimerical.  Clothes.  Shoes.  Wagons of food and wine.

And then finally the rest.  The trod was collapsing, and they scrambled to find their way.  The last one through was William.  She saw him one last time, and they both cried.  She screamed his name as her mother held her there, kept her from getting caught in the collapsing trod.

And she never saw him again. 

It was her first time around, but it may have been his last.


	7. Let Me Tell You About My Dad

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Suicide TW, mental abuse TW, discussions of PTSD

This one's different, and it's going to take a while.

My name is Blythe Elizabeth Nelson.  I was born on July 26, 1959, the year of the pig and under the sign of Leo.  My mother was a seneschal and a healer.

My father was a warrior.

His name was Edward Walenczyk.

He served in the US Marines, 1st Batallion 9th.

He enlisted in September of 1958, not long after he got out of school.  He'd always wanted to be career, and he never expected to have a reason to come home.

He never really came home.

He never married my mother, because they weren't really in love.  It'd never been about forever with them, just a summer after high school where they had some fun.

Then she was pregnant, and he was deployed, and he offered to marry her for the money and the taxes but she said no.  She'd have me and she'd raise me on her own, and by god she did it.  

And he never forgot. And a little, I think, he never forgave.

My father was a warrior, and he was very good at his job.  He loved it very much, and he kept at it.  When he was on leave he'd travel, and he'd send things to mom, and that's the only way I knew him.

There were photographs and there were postcards and there were trinkets.  A necklace of shells, and a carving on a coconut shell.  A snowglobe.  A little glass rollercoaster.  Mom kept them in a china cabinet at the end of the living room.

We had a one-bedroom apartment, so that's where I slept, and I used to sit up some nights and think about him.  Think about my father, off fighting the wars, sending us treasures from the far beyond like a conquering king in days of old.

I'd never met him, but I loved him very much.

He went to Vietnam in 1965, the same year I started school.

He never really came home.

When you're good at something, when you really enjoy it, you can become the job. Musicians sometimes think of themselves as part instrument.  Authors see stories everywhere.  And soldiers...

Soldiers carry the war with them, no matter what.  Soldiers live there.

He was in Vietnam from 1965 to 1969.  When the counts came down, 1st Battalion 9th had the highest death rate in all the American military.  Highest kill count, too.  Most equipment lost.  Most wounded.  Most dishonorable discharges.   Every record you can imagine.

Most people only went for one tour.  Two was crazy.  Three was unthinkable.

My father did  _eight_.

My father was a warrior.  He carried the battlefield in his blood and his bones.  He only came back when they took out so much of his leg he couldn't stand anymore.

And even then, he never really came home.

I met him for the first time when he was quietly sitting on the couch that'd been my bed.  I was nine years old, and I was meeting my daddy, and I already loved him very much.  And he was so quiet, and still like death.

I told him stories.  All the stories that I'd made up about all the things that he'd sent us.  He never said a word, but he nodded at some of them.  I'm sure he heard.  Maybe he nodded when I was right.  Maybe he nodded when he liked the sound of things.

His parents were dead, and he didn't have anywhere to go, so Mom took him in.  We'd taken in plenty of people before, but this time it was my father, which meant this time it was for keeps.

He got his military disability, and he had a little other money besides.  Combat pay, hazard pay socked away for a rainy day.  We had enough money to move to a three-bedroom apartment.  A room for my father, and another for my mother, and the last for me.

I'd never had my own room before, and I considered it a gift from him.  He was a king, and he gave me a castle.

By some strange quirk of architecture, the corner room was the smallest so that's what I got.  I had six whole narrow windows all my own, and even though it was cold in the winter it was nice in the summer, and I could keep my stuffed toys on the windowsills to keep out parts of the chill. 

My father was a warrior, and he wouldn't let himself just sit too idle.  He ran the alleyways down on the nice ends of town and he brought us back all kinds of pretty things.  I got dolls and toys and a whole canopy for my bed, and pots and pots of paint.  

He found out I liked to make things pretty, and he brought me paint and ribbons and things.  I must've painted things on my walls two hundred times in the two years that we lived in that apartment, bright splashes of blue and purple and green, lots of flowers and the Chicago skyline with the Sears tower poking up between the windows.  God knows what I inhaled and ate from those little pots.  Maybe that's why I was sick for a while.

And he still didn't want me, I think, because it wasn't all sunshine.  That's the best way to say that, because come sundown he'd start to drink or worse.  And he'd forget.

I guess these days you'd say he had PTSD, and that he was sundowning, but in those days we just said he'd have a funny turn.

He'd forget where he was and who we were.  And my mother, she wouldn't take any shit from him, but she wasn't always around.  And I'd come home from school, and there would be my father, the warrior.

And he'd never quite come home.

I don't want to give you the wrong impression.  He never laid a hand on me.  There were no injuries, no bruises.  He didn't slip into my bedroom at night.  He didn't do anything to my body.  

But he made me a warrior too.

I won't tell you too many stories, but I will tell you what I do.

I wake up in the middle of the night at every sound.  

I flinch at glass breaking.

I don't cry at movies.  I don't cry at all, if I can help it.  I take injuries stoically   I push through the pain.  I work through the sickness. 

I don't trust people.  I don't talk to them, much.  I don't like lies. I don't trust promises.

I hoard food.  I know how to cook for myself. I know how to make spoiled food good again. I know how to open a can without an opener.  I know how to find water in an alley.  

I know how to sleep outside in a city, on a fire escape, when you're too small to make the ladder to the ground work.  I know how to climb up up up, into the sky, and set off the alarm so someone lets you inside.  I know not to go home.

I know how to feel the mood shift in a room.  I know how to read stance and posture.  I know when to tell a joke and when to run.  I know when to make myself big.  I know when to make myself small.

I know not to talk about myself too much.  I know how to tell the same story over and over, because it's a safe story. 

I know how to apologize.

I know how to scan the newspaper for as many interesting things as I can, places to go that aren't home, programs to watch that aren't me.  I know how to distract.

I know how to see a sick man for sick.  I know how to see a weak man for weak.  

I know how dangerous both of them are.

I know not to touch a gun that isn't mine.  I know to pretend it isn't there even when it is.  I know not to see it in someone's hand.

I know when he calls you home and you feel like something's wrong, you run.

Because I didn't, once.  When I was eleven, he called me inside from painting on the fire escape.  And I could tell that something was wrong.  He called me inside and I felt everything that was wrong, and I saw the gun in his hand.  And I went inside.

And he told me that he'd made me a warrior.  He told me he'd taught me what he could, and I'd learn the rest from the world.

He told me to never forget the warriors, even if the world did.  He pressed his purple heart into my hand, and he told me to keep it safe.  He said I would understand soon, but there was another war for me to fight.

He said some day I'd know.

He told me to close my eyes and count to ten, and at the end of it to turn around and walk out of the door.  He said not to look back.

I closed my eyes.

On eight, I heard the gun go off.

And I didn't turn around.  I opened my eyes.

The gun was on the ground, and so was my daddy.  On the ground, and on the couch, and on the wall.  

And I felt the world shift.

That's it.  That's the story of two warriors.  Edward James Walenczyk, warrior of the United States, and Blythe Elizabeth Nelson, warrior of the Dreaming.

That's the story of my father and my chrysalis.

That's the day I ran away.

And I've never quite come home.

**Author's Note:**

> A Companion to http://archiveofourown.org/works/3882799/chapters/8680753


End file.
